A monster most every weekday. Three adventure seeds a post.
Because Pathfinder and 3.5 are more fun than work.
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Wednesday, March 2, 2016

Clockwork Familiar

Toads aren’t that cuddly.Weasels smell.And vipers are so déclassé.It makes you just want to throw in the towel
and build your own familiar—specifically, a clockwork familiar.

Usually designed to look like dragons or birds or spiders
(that’s the way we do itin the Wild,Wild West), clockwork familiars are an
Improved Familiar choice that leverages the advantages of having a construct at
your beck and call rather than a flesh-and-blood creature.(They can't, for instance, be healed normally
and rust is a problem, but that just makes them all the more obedient to their
masters.)Even better, their owners can
customize them by incorporating temporary magic items into their bodies,
granting them both an ongoing effect as long as they possess the item and a
more powerful ability if they choose to drain the item’s charge.This flexibility endears them to wizards who
plan for contingencies (which is every wizard who hopes to live long).It’s never a bad thing to have a portable detect magic source on hand—especially
one that can talk to you—and a clockwork familiar’s stored potion of invisibility, fly,
or gaseous form could easily be the
difference between life and death for its master.

A journeyman wizard’s
master has passed away.The
adventurer is first notified of this when his master’s clockwork familiar comes
looking for him.Long neglected by the
ailing wizard, the familiar has barely survived the arduous journey to reach
the journeyman.The battered, half-mad
construct attacks the young mage, seeing him as the heir to not only the
master’s books and wisdom, but also his failures.

Knowledge of the
crafting of clockworkwas snuffed out in Oyroa when barbarian hordes
overran the City of Miracles.But the
clockworks themselves remain—shiny brass ravens, badgers, bees, even delicate
bejeweled carp.It is considered an
auspicious feat for a caster to coax one of these creatures into her
service.And not all of the familiars
are benign.Some still act on the
instructions of mages long dead, others have been perverted by the animating
spirits inside them, and all are potentially dangerous.

Most clockwork
familiars are bespoke creations.But
some cosmopolitan magocracies have artificers who can help a mage with the
construction.Fabriker Nicholas
Sturmhandt is renowned for his clockwork constructions, particularly his
ambulatory birdcages (with mechanical signing birds inside) and the clockwork
familiar kits he supplies wealthy wizards.Darker rumors suggest that he also specializes in creating clockwork
gnomes…and that real, quite unwilling gnomish victims are essential to the
process.Getting into his compound to
investigate will be difficult, as Herr Sturmhandt has several clockwork familiar
lookouts—far more than any one mage could ordinarily bind.

After two weeks off, The New Indie Canon is
back! Today I’m going to take you from the Low Anthem’s “To Ohio” to the
Violent Femmes’ “I Held Her in My Arms,” with stops along the way for Beverly,
Spacehog, Into It. Over It., the Sun Days, some SXSW teasers, and more. Stream it. Download it. Love it.

By the way, please forgive the occasional typos. I am aware of them, but disagreements between MS Word and the Blogger template make my entries nearly impossible to edit once posted. I blame gremlins. You can find a more polished version of this blog over on Tumblr.